Items Tagged: FlashSoft

Working with the Taneja Group on the Customer Validation report was a true pleasure. We are very happy with how it turned out and have received numerous glowing praises on the quality of the work and value of the customer research findings. Many thanks for creating such an excellent demand generation resource, and for the webinar where you presented the findings of the report. Both assets have become very valuable tools for our demand generation efforts.

SanDisk is the first major vendor to break-through the challenges of integrating flash with the hypervisor without disrupting the way the administrator manages virtual servers or virtual server storage.

SanDisk Corp. today introduced the VMware vSphere server virtualization version of its FlashSoft flash caching software, which is designed to accelerate application performance and virtual machine (VM) density.

SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, today announced a significant upgrade to its enterprise software portfolio with a new version of its FlashSoft™ software for Windows Server® and Linux operating systems. FlashSoft 3.2 server-side solid state caching software complements and enhances the performance of existing applications, and server and storage systems.

Accelerating the VM with FlashSoft: Software-Driven Flash-Caching for the Virtual Infrastructure

Storage performance has long been the bane of the enterprise infrastructure. Fortunately, in the past couple of years, solid-state technologies have allowed new comers as well as established storage vendors to start shaping up clever, cost effective, and highly efficient storage solutions that unlock greater storage performance. It is our opinion that the most innovative of these solutions are the ones that require no real alteration in the storage infrastructure, nor a change in data management and protection practices.

This is entirely possible with server-side caching solutions today. Server-side caching solutions typically use either PCIe solid-state NAND Flash or SAS/SATA SSDs installed in the server alongside a hardware or software IO handler component that mirrors commonly utilized data blocks onto the local high speed solid-state storage. Then the IO handler redirects server requests for data blocks to those local copies that are served up with lower latency (microseconds instead of milliseconds) and greater bandwidth than the original backend storage. Since data is simply cached, instead of moved, the solution is transparent to the infrastructure. Data remains consolidated on the same enterprise infrastructure, and all of the original data management practices – such as snapshots and backup – still work. Moreover, server-side caches can actually offload IO from the backend storage system, and can allow a single storage system to effectively serve many more clients. Clearly there’s tremendous potential value in a solution that can be transparently inserted into the infrastructure and address storage performance problems.

Server virtualization can bring your business significant benefits, especially in the initial stages of deployment. Companies we speak with in the early stages of adoption often cite more flexible and automated management of both infrastructure and apps, along with CAPEX and OPEX savings resulting from workload consolidation. However, as an increasing number of apps are virtualized, many of these organizations encounter significant storage performance challenges. As more virtualized workloads are consolidated on a given host, aggregate IO demands put tremendous pressure on shared storage, server and networking resources, with the strain further exacerbated by the IO blender effect, in which IO streams processed by the hypervisor become random and unpredictable. Together, these conditions reduce host productivity—e.g. by lowering data and transactional throughput and increasing application response time—and may prevent you from meeting performance requirements for your business-critical applications.

How can you best address these storage performance challenges in your virtual infrastructure? Adding solid-state or flash storage will provide a significant performance boost, but where should it be deployed to give your critical applications the biggest improvement per dollar spent? How can you ensure that the additional storage fits effortlessly into your existing environment, without requiring disruptive and costly changes to your infrastructure, applications, or management capabilities?

We believe that server-side acceleration provides the best answer to all of these questions. In particular, we like server solutions that combine intelligent caching with high-performance PCIe memory, which are tightly integrated with the virtualization platform, and enable sharing of storage across multiple hosts or an entire cluster. The Flash Virtualization System from SanDisk is an outstanding example of such a solution. As we’ll see, Flash Virtualization enables a shared cache resource across a cluster of hosts in a VMware environment, improving application performance and response time without disrupting primary storage or host servers. This solution will allow you to satisfy SLAs and keep your users happy, without breaking the bank.

For all the gains server virtualization has brought in compute utilization, flexibility and efficiency, it has created an equally weighty set of challenges on the storage side, particularly in traditional storage environments. As servers become more consolidated, virtualized workloads must increasingly contend for scarce storage and IO resources, preventing them from consistently meeting throughput and response time objectives. On top of that, there is often no way to ensure that the most critical apps or virtual machines can gain priority access to data storage as needed, even in lightly consolidated environments. With a majority (70+%) of all workloads now running virtualized, it can be tough to achieve strong and predictable app performance with traditional shared storage.

To address these challenges, many VMware customers are now turning to server-side acceleration solutions, in which the flash storage resource can be placed closer to the application. But server-side acceleration is not a panacea. While some point solutions have been adapted to work in virtualized infrastructures, they generally lack enterprise features, and are often not well integrated with vSphere and the vCenter management platform. Such offerings are at best band-aid treatments, and at worst second-class citizens in the virtual infrastructure, proving difficult to scale, deploy and manage. To provide true enterprise value, a solution should seamlessly deliver performance to your critical VMware workloads, but without compromising availability, workload portability, or ease of deployment and management.

This is where FlashSoft 4 for VMware vSphere 6 comes in. FlashSoft is an intelligent, software-defined caching solution that accelerates your critical VMware workloads as an integrated vSphere data service, while still allowing you to take full advantage of all the vSphere enterprise capabilities you use today.

In this paper we examine the technology underlying the FlashSoft 4 for vSphere 6 solution, describe the features and capabilities it enables, and articulate the benefits customers can expect to realize upon deploying the solution.